Our statistical results show that that the Depression was good for fascists. It was especially good for fascists in countries that had not enjoyed democracy before 1914; where fascist parties already had a parliamentary base; in countries on the losing side in WWI; and in countries that experienced boundary changes after 1918.

Since Germany ticks each of these boxes and saw a particularly large increase in the fascist vote, one may ask whether these interaction effects are driven by the German experience alone. The answer is that they are not.

Importantly, it shows that what mattered was not the current growth of the economy but cumulative growth or, more to the point, the depth of the cumulative recession. One year of contraction was not enough to significantly boost extremism, in other words, but a depression that persisted for years was.

The results stand up to the inclusion of control variables, including period dummies, the urbanisation rate, and the effective electoral threshold, and to alternative econometric specifications. In other regressions, we again find that the impact of poor growth was greater in countries where fascists were already represented in parliament and in countries with shorter histories of democracy. Our results are thus consistent with the claim of authors such as Almond and Verba (1989) that political culture mattered, and with the argument of Persson and Tabellini (2009) that countries with a longer history of democracy accumulate social and political capital that increases the probability that they will be able to resist threats to the prevailing political system.

Finally, we find that the electoral success of right-wing anti-system parties was shaped by the structure of the electoral system. A higher minimum share of the vote needed in order for a party to gain parliamentary representation made it more difficult for fringe parties to translate votes into seats and lowered fascist electoral gains.